Follow-up strikes are apparently a hallmark of the so-called “signature strikes” President Obama recently approved for use in Yemen. Signature strikes are those that target unidentified individuals in unidentified groups that are not engaged in direct hostilities with the US, nor are they presenting any imminent threat the administration is willing to establish.

“Our lives are valueless in the eyes of our government,” said one resident of Jaar at the time of the strikes, “and that is why civilians are being killed without a crime.”

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recorded up to 746 people killed in US strikes in Yemen since 2002, with as many as 117 confirmed civilians, 24 of them children. Neither the US government, nor the Yemeni government will comment on these airstrikes or the casualties associated with them.

In a hospital near Jaar, NPR spoke to a young boy who was injured and badly burned from the May airstrike. Another man Ali Al Amoudi said a strike “hit his house and three others just a few weeks ago in the town of Shaqra, just down the road from Jaar. His 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter were hit. They died in his arms on the way to the hospital.”

Saleh Qaid Toayman was a Yemeni who was killed in an airstrike in October and is supposed to have “fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s with men who would later join al-Qaida,” NPR reports. His son, Azzedine, was nearby when an airstrike killed him and another of his sons.

“I went to see my father and my brother. They were scattered into pieces.” Azzedine and his other surviving siblings “say they want to fight against those who killed their father, namely against America.” Saleh’s eldest son has already formally joined Ansar al Sharia, an al-Qaeda-linked group, to avenge his father’s death.

There can be no logical reason why a nation as powerful as the US would pursue a course of action such as this. This is NOT how we were taught to act as respectable players on the world stage. We were taught that we were examples of how other nations should act.

WHO decided that the image we had projected to the world and taught our children for so long was no longer going to be the face of who were are to the world. This is really sick and twisted. Whatever happened to doing what was right instead of merely convenient? What is being done now, in our names, is so far from being justifiable as to be deviant behavior. Where is the media (I know, I know – telling the truth would curtail "access")?

Does not anyone remember the shame borne by the German people after WWII for taking the easy path and remaining quiet while the barbarians savaged their world?

Where is the shame for what America is doing to the world now? I know, "Check back after "AMERICA'S GOT TALENT!!"

These "innocents" are the ones who have elected the same murderers time and again. These "innocents" are the ones who prefer to look the other way. These "innocents" are the ones who close ranks in supporting their "gallant" troops when their crimes happen to be shown. Taken to its logical conclusion, the people in Nazi Germany are ten times more innocent than the current American citizenry.